Jean-Paul Sartre, whose first novel, "Nausea," had a biographer as its hero, spent the last 10 years of his working life on a massive psychobiography of a writer he had always detested for his estheticism and his reactionary opinions—Gustave Flaubert. He customarily explained this curious project as an attempt to synthesize what can be understood today about an individual life, given what we have learned from a century of work in psychoanalysis, social psychology, linguistics, anthropology and the symbolic analysis of culture and individual behavior. But for Sartre, understanding always involved the discovery of that point at which all constraints—external accidents, the miseries of psychic determinism and social conditioning—are suddenly transformed into the active gestures and free choices of an individual—what he called "praxis." It is never easy to reach that magical point. "The Family Idiot" takes some 3,000 pages to get there….

Sartre called "The Family Idiot" a "true novel," and it does tell a story and eventually reach a shattering climax. The work can be described most simply as a dialectic, which shifts between two seemingly alternative interpretations of Flaubert's destiny: a psychoanalytic one, centered on his family and on his childhood, and a Marxist one, whose guiding themes are the status of the artist in Flaubert's period and the historical and ideological contradictions faced by his social class, the bourgeoisie. But there is no determinism in his approach, for Sartre insisted on seeing contradictions—whether psychic-familial or socio-economic—as so many situations for which we cannot but invent responses: "Neurosis," as he says in an earlier work, "is an original solution the child invents on the point of stifling to death."

In his Marxist interpretation of Flaubert's situation as a young bourgeois artist in the middle of the 19th century, Sartre articulates two levels of dilemma: the crisis of the serious middle-class artist in a market system, faced with a disappearing audience; and the ideological crisis of the French bourgeoisie, which during the French Revolution had invented the notion of a universal human nature as a weapon against the aristocracy, only to find itself confronted in the days of the 1848 revolution with a new proletarian underclass it was reluctant to recognize as part of that universal humanity. The bourgeoisie will "solve" this new problem by becoming Victorian, by repressing the animal and physical "nature" it seemed to share with the proletarians and by transforming its earlier humanism into a misanthropic positivism. (p. 5)

Sartre here develops a theory of generational "misprision" (or misreading), drawing on the concept of the "practico-inert," which he had developed in his "Critique of Dialectical Reason." Sartre had always seen literary works as responses to concrete situations, responses that become intelligible only when grasped within those situations. He now draws the unexpected consequences: Like tools, literary works outlive the situations for which they were intended, and they are passed down with a new material inertia…. The artists of Flaubert's generation had no way of understanding the practical purposes for which the older generation had invented their now inert themes: critical negativity, misanthropy, the ideal of classlessness, the defense of the autonomy of the intellectual (which will now be "mistranslated" as art for art's sake), and a quasi-religious conviction of the nothingness of the world and the emptiness of life. Crippled by the themes of their predecessors, the following generation became artists without inspiration. This was not a subjective matter, a lack of talent or vocation. Rather, Sartre's idea of the practico-inert—the weight of so many dead artistic ideologies from an incomprehensible past—suggests a situation in which it was objectively impossible for them to have something to say.

Flaubert's solution opened a door that had not existed before; "Madame Bovary" was not just another novel, but an original and creative act, which in one stroke resolved all the objective contradictions that paralyzed Flaubert's contemporaries. This solution was the discovery of what Sartre calls "the imaginary" and its "derealizing" operation on the world: "I would like to write a book about nothing, a book without external links, which would be held together by the internal force of its style … just as the earth without being suspended moves in the air, a book which would have almost no subject matter or at least whose subject would be almost invisible if that is possible," Flaubert declared.

Now the riddle that Sartre set out to solve in "The Family Idiot" becomes clear. In Flaubert, the moment met the man, as the old historians liked to put it. But who was Flaubert? What gave this Norman doctor's son his chance with history? To reach the answer to this question Sartre had to return to the subjective moment of his dialectic and patiently work through the formation of Gustave's psyche in childhood. Unavoidably, this emphasis on the subjective moment makes its relationship to the objective social situation of the writer in Flaubert's time problematical. Sartre's solution seems to posit what the philosophers used to call some "pre-established harmony" between Gustave's private neurosis and the public dilemmas of 19th-century intellectuals and bourgeoisie (which Sartre, parodying Hegel, terms the "objective neurosis" of the age). Today, however, "pre-established harmony" has another name: overdetermination. The Flaubert family, within which Gustave elaborated his private solution, his personal neurosis, was itself the result of objective social and historical forces. (pp. 5, 16)

For Sartre, the meaning and dynamic of the "imaginary" is most clear in Flaubert's style, which he sees as the correlative of Gustave's lifelong suicide: It is a way of killing off the outside world without changing a thing, of transforming human instruments and activities into the suspended objects of esthetic contemplation. The point of the "imaginary"—for Sartre a veritable passion, demonic and inhuman—is not to turn away from the world in religious or otherworldly fashion, but to keep your eyes filled with the richness of things and relationships while secretly emptying them of their density in an "internal hemorrhage of being." Flaubert's style "derealizes" things, transforms them into images, in order to draw the whole immense being of the world into nothingness without changing a leaf or a blade of grass in the process. Yet that style is an operation born of resentment; it is meant to demoralize bourgeois readers without their becoming aware that their world has been pulled out from under them. (p. 16)

When one thinks of the 10 years during which Sartre shackled himself to this immense project … "The Family Idiot" sometimes looks like a form of self-imposed penance, a private duty jealously guarded against the reproaches of his Maoist friends (they wanted him to write a proletarian novel). If, however, one sees the theme of the imaginary in inseparable dialectical tension with that other lifelong theme of Sartre's work, which is praxis, then Sartre's stubborn devotion to his Flaubert project becomes more comprehensible; the study of the "imaginary" can then be taken as a self-diagnosis of bourgeois "objective neurosis," while praxis—deliberate action in the real world—stands as the projection of a radically different mode of activity, identified with the proletariat.

For it should not be thought that the nihilism of the imaginary, as it is elaborately anatomized in "The Family Idiot," is a mere 19th-century curiosity or a local feature of some specifically French middle-class culture; nor is it a private obsession of Jean-Paul Sartre himself. Turning things into images, abolishing the real world, grasping the world as little more than a text or sign-system—this is notoriously the very logic of our own consumer society, the society of the image or the media event (the Vietnam War as a television series). Flaubert's private solution, his invention of a new "derealizing" esthetic strategy, may seem strange and distant, not because it is archaic, but because it has gradually become the logic of our media society, thereby becoming invisible to us. This is the sense in which "The Family Idiot"—at first glance so cumbersome and forbidding a project—may well speak with terrifying immediacy to Americans in the 1980's. (pp. 16, 18)